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Guest: Carol Dean Jones

Topics: quilting books

She says: "The characters in my books are all in their 70s, and they live in a retirement community in the Midwest. It has a rec center and lots of classes. Friendships and relationships are a big part of my books, as well as quilting. My main character needed something to do when she got to the retirement village. Her husband had died and she wanted to preserve his ties, so she learned how to quilt. In the books, they always make the quilt that's on the cover. And the publisher is including the pattern for the quilt on the cover at the end of the books."

She says: "Our winery is called Parsonage and we have a small vineyard in Carmel Valley, California. I've been making quilts since the late 1970's, and we purchased our vineyard property in 1997 and planted the vineyard in 1998. We planted these little baby vines and you have to wait several years before you can even have any grapes to harvest. So our first harvest was in 2000, and then you make the wine and it sits in barrels. It took several years to get to the point where we actually needed a label to put on a wine bottle. But then, I'd started experimenting with quilts with vineyard themes like grapes and grape leaves. So actually, when we got to that point, I had some nice quilts that we could put on the labels."

She says: "I think if my lower school art teacher knew what I was up to now, she would've totally seen this coming. I was the kid who was always doodling with pencils, but really intricate designs. So any art project that she would assign, I would try to figure out a way to work that into it. So for me, all those little intricate details are things I've always been doing. It's not that I really think it through -- I like the way it enhances certain parts of the design, so that's always been a part of my process."

She says: "We're conducting a contest that's system-wide for our students that offers them an opportunity for them to tell a story of their personal triumph over a struggle. And with their story, they also get to submit a barn quilt design. We're actually in the process of picking out our final 8 winners... I found The Farmer's Wife 1930's Sampler Quilt book. And I would sit there and read this book at night and cry thinking of all these women who had had so many terrible things happen to them in the Depression, yet they perservered and fought through it and they were ok. So I just starting thinking of how many other stories out there that can be told that could help influence other people's lives."